by Jenny Nelson
Williams composed various character themes, for Tintin, Captain Haddock, the Thompson twins and Snowy the faithful dog, and the result is a vibrant collection of music. As Spielberg comments, ‘When I first heard the Tintin score, I felt as though John hadn’t aged a bit since his work on Jaws and Star Wars. This new music has the same energy and exuberance, and it’s so intricately interwoven into the story, characters, and images that it makes me feel like a youngster again.’ There’s a playfulness and joy in Williams’ skills as a composer, and he would return to this light-hearted approach, with added childlike wonder, for their twenty-seventh collaboration, The BFG (2016).
There was yet another gear shift for Lincoln (2012), a notable project for Spielberg and Williams because it marked their fortieth anniversary of working together. It’s a stately story of the final four months of America’s sixteenth president as he sets out to ban slavery by ensuring that Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment. At nearly three hours long, this is a sedate film, focusing on the political process. The score takes a back seat, filling roughly an hour, and the music allows the audience to reflect on what history can teach us. As Spielberg explains, ‘John and I were here to guide and support this story, but not to make our voices heard above his.’
This is another occasion on which Williams exercises restraint, and in so doing reveals the emotional heart of the film. There is an intimacy to the orchestral performance, with fluid interplay between specific instruments, such as horn and piano, perhaps mirroring the individuals on-screen and their movements within the wider political landscape. The composer has said working on Lincoln was a very different experience compared with Spielberg films of the previous decade or so, and described it as a ‘musical tapestry’: as with his other war and political dramas, he has constructed pieces that capture hope amid the conflict. The result is a graceful, stirring and strangely personal score.
‘I don’t think there’s been a single moment where we’ve had a disagreement about music,’ stated Spielberg in 2012. ‘We certainly have a high regard for each other, but I just think that’s about Johnny hitting the target in an uncanny way.’ Spielberg’s nickname for Williams offers a touching insight into their friendship, highlighting the respect he has for Williams’ music: ‘I call him Max. As a matter of fact, when I named my first child Max, that came from a nickname that I gave Johnny from the first time we met. It’s a joke that sometimes his music reminded me of Max Steiner. And he would always laugh, so I got to calling him Max.’ Williams remains equally full of praise for Spielberg: ‘Working with Steven has been a delight. He has the most wonderful personality and his goal is always to entertain people while also trying to improve the world.’
Williams certainly owes a debt to the ‘father of film music’ but over the decades he has built his own reputation as a movie master, revered by fans and aspiring composers alike for his stamp on the cinematic sound world. Spielberg has described him as ‘one of the greatest storytellers of all time’. The truth is they both are, and that’s where the key to their successful collaboration lies: their passion for film-making continues unabated from project to project, and they have always maintained a high regard for the story, and ensured that the audience is placed at the centre of it. From wartime heroes and friendly giants to aliens, dinosaurs and sharks, the Spielberg–Williams partnership has been welcomed into cinemas and households for generations, earning both director and composer a rightful place in film history.
Collaboration History
The Sugarland Express (1974)
Jaws (1975)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
1941 (1979)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Empire of the Sun (1987)
Always (1989)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Hook (1991)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Schindler’s List (1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Amistad (1997)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Minority Report (2002)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
The Terminal (2004)
War of the Worlds (2005)
Munich (2005)
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), produced by Spielberg
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)
War Horse (2011)
Lincoln (2012)
The BFG (2016)
The Post (2017)
Suggested Playlist
The Sugarland Express, Theme
Jaws, Title Theme
Jaws, The Shark Cage Fugue
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, End Titles
1941, March
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Raiders March
Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marion’s Theme
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Escape– Chase– Saying Goodbye
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, End Credits
Empire of the Sun, Exsultate Justi
Empire of the Sun, Cadillac of the Skies
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra
Hook, Flight to Neverland
Jurassic Park, Theme
Schindler’s List, Remembrances
Schindler’s List, Theme
Amistad, Dry Your Tears, Afrika
Saving Private Ryan, Hymn to the Fallen
A.I Artificial Intelligence, Where Dreams Are Born
Catch Me If You Can, Catch Me If You Can
The Terminal, Viktor’s Tale
Munich, A Prayer for Peace
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Introducing the Thompsons, and Snowy’s Chase
War Horse, Dartmoor, 1912
War Horse, The Homecoming
Lincoln, Freedom’s Call
Lincoln, The People’s House
The BFG, Dream Country
The Post, The Presses Roll
The Post, Mother and Daughter
Take one of the most successful and critically acclaimed film directors working today, add one of the most popular and versatile film composers, then sit back and prepare yourself for a thrilling collaboration. The partnership between Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer is a powerful one because they consistently demonstrate they are an equal match, each striving to experiment and push the boundaries of creativity.
Christopher Nolan is currently the sixth-highest-grossing director following the mighty top three of Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and James Cameron. At the time of writing, his films have received thirty-five Academy Award nominations and seven wins, with one of the hits of summer 2017, Dunkirk, in the running for eight categories at the Academy Awards in 2018. The British-American director, producer and screenwriter has mastered the art of balancing bankable movies with independent sensibilities and never assumes that blockbuster equals brainless. With only ten feature-length films under his belt, he has built such a strong reputation that audiences will flock to see something on the basis of it being a Christopher Nolan movie. Not many directors wield that power.
Hans Zimmer is also at the top of his game and has been for decades. The German composer has scored over 150 films and can turn his hand to animation just as easily as action, and to pretty much everything in between. An accomplished performer who packs out stadiums with his live shows, Zimmer won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Lion King in 1995 and has so far received ten other Oscar nominations for movies as varied as Rain Man (1988), Sherlock Holmes (2009), The Thin Red Line (1998) and Gladiator (2000). Despite a vast back catalogue, his scores are often described as having the ‘Hans Zimmer sound’, generally summarised by momentous crescendos and big, bold, electronic squelches that have been frequently copied, but when asked about h
is signature style, he drily knocks it back by pointing out a few other films he’s worked on: Driving Miss Daisy, As Good As It Gets, Frost/Nixon, Thelma and Louise . . . There is no one ‘sound’ when it comes to Hans Zimmer.
The director and composer first started working together in 2005 on Batman Begins, the first film in The Dark Knight trilogy that redefined the superhero movie genre. Fellow composer James Newton Howard collaborated with them on the first two films before ceding scoring duties wholly to Zimmer for the third, The Dark Knight Rises. Along with Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk, Zimmer has scored six of Nolan’s directorial features, cementing his role as Nolan’s go-to composer. What’s significant about their partnership is they genuinely collaborate on each project, to the extent that Zimmer has described Nolan as ‘the co-creator of the score’. In the sleeve notes for The Dark Knight, the director notes, ‘Hans sees through the screen to the dark beating heart of the story and is faithful to that and only that’, and speaking in 2015 on the day his BAFTA nomination for Interstellar had been announced, Zimmer acknowledged his immersive approach: ‘I think Chris wanted to work with me because of the way I work with directors, which is slightly different. I come in very early into the project, I get really in among it in the film-making process. I’ve got a big mouth, I keep asking questions, you know like “Why is the character doing this?” and “Do we need this shot?”, and “Hang on, if you gave me that sort of a shot I could maybe do this, that and the other”, and it takes a certain director who can embrace that.’ Luckily, Nolan has.
Zimmer’s career began as a performer, playing keyboards and synthesisers in bands including The Buggles, and his composing work took shape when he partnered up with Stanley Myers in the 1980s. Myers was a prolific film composer whose popular ‘Cavatina’, written originally for the movie The Walking Stick in 1970 and later used in The Deer Hunter, remains a Classic FM favourite, and he was something of a mentor to Zimmer. They collaborated on various films, including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), although British audiences may be more familiar with his work on a TV show from this decade: Zimmer is the co-composer of the theme for Going for Gold.
Nolan aside, Zimmer has formed long-standing partnerships with other illustrious directors: seven films each with Ron Howard, including Rush (2013) and The Da Vinci Code (2006), and with Gore Verbinski, encompassing most of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. His six films with Ridley Scott brought him acclaim, especially Gladiator, and his four collaborations with the late Tony Scott were also successful, not least Crimson Tide (2005), for which Zimmer received a Grammy Award. The composer is most often found at his Santa Monica studio, Remote Control Productions, which is quite the powerhouse for creating film and video-game scores, and Zimmer has collaborated with and mentored a host of composers there, including Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones), Harry Gregson-Williams (The Martian), Lorne Balfe (The Lego Batman Movie), John Powell (How to Train Your Dragon) and Rupert Gregson-Williams (Wonder Woman).
A largely self-taught musician, Zimmer doesn’t compose on paper but writes using a computer, allowing him and the director to listen to a virtual score as a prototype. He describes how he sees his role: ‘I never went to music school, my two weeks of piano lessons were two weeks wasted . . . I always write from a personal point of view and I love the directors that allow me to do that. I don’t think there’s a director that ever tells a composer what to do, not really, not a real director. It is your job to walk into the room and go, “I’m going to do something you can’t even imagine.” That’s the job. And so you have to come in with a point of view and you have to come in with an idea, and it might be contrary to what the director is thinking of, but if it’s a good idea, they’ll embrace it.’
The absence of formal training may have made the composer more daring in his choices and approach, and in his ability to keep the music personal. He had never composed for animation before The Lion King, but for Zimmer the process developed into something he had not envisaged: ‘Sometimes the best things happen for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t want to do a cartoon but at the time I had a six-year-old daughter and I was desperate to show off and take my princess to the ball or premiere. I couldn’t really take her to see one of Ridley’s movies! So I said, “OK, I’ll do it.” I sat in front of these storyboards and I have no idea how to write about fuzzy animals. I’m listening to the story and it’s the story of a son losing his father at a really early age and that’s what happened to me in real life. I never dealt with it and suddenly I was confronted with having to deal with the death of my father, and so it became really that.’
Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer attending a ceremony for Zimmer’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, 2010.
As with many of the directors featured in this book, Christopher Nolan was fascinated by films from a young age, borrowing his father’s Super 8 camera and making home movies. Speaking on the day of the Dunkirk world premiere in London, he cited Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey as two films that were formative musical influences, and also credited his collaborator: ‘I like to kid Hans because I’m a little bit younger than him, but I started to come to his scores as a teenager, particularly for Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, which I think is a masterpiece of 1980s synthesiser scores. In fact, one track from that really provided the seed of a lot that we did in Batman Begins, and expanded on and turned into something else. I would also point to Vangelis, particularly his work on Bladerunner and Chariots of Fire – those are fascinating scores in terms of the integration of synthesised elements with more classical harmonies, really interesting bridges between time periods.’
Nolan grew up between the UK and the USA. He read English Literature at University College London and was president of the film society. With some short films under his belt, his first feature, Following, was made in 1998, shortly after graduation. A self-funded project starring Nolan’s friends and co-produced by Emma Thomas, now his wife and co-founder of his production company Syncopy, Following is a remarkable achievement. Shot over weekends in between the cast’s and crew’s full-time jobs, the neo-noir crime tale was well received, picking up awards at international film festivals and making the young director a name to watch.
Nolan’s next film, Memento (2000), launched him into the big league, receiving two Academy Award nominations, for Best Editing and Best Original Screenplay. A puzzle of memory that plays with time and challenges the audience with plot twists and narrative devices, Memento was passed over for distribution by many big studios but became a real word-of-mouth hit. The structure is astonishingly assured, with two storylines – one told chronologically and the other told in reverse order – that meet at the end of the film. Nolan has described the writing process for his films in terms of geometric patterns, and he often draws diagrams when plotting his stories, which is unsurprising considering how so many of his projects avoid a linear narrative. Memento is so meticulously crafted that it is actually possible to watch the film backwards, scene by scene. Director Steven Soderbergh championed the film and the director, helping him to get his first big-budget thriller, the remake of the Norwegian film Insomnia, in 2002. Quite a leap from that self-funded debut when he’d used relatives’ houses for film sets and his mum had helped out with the sandwiches between shoots.
Cheltenham-born composer David Julyan scored Nolan’s first three features, having worked on his earlier shorts Larceny and Doodlebug, and they would collaborate again in 2006 for The Prestige, released between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Boasting another satisfying plot twist, this film was the first occasion on which the director utilised a specific and disorientating musical effect called the Shepard Tone, generated by the superimposition of sine waves separated by octaves: ‘Done correctly, you create this illusion of a continuing rise in pitch that never goes out of range.’ Nolan used it on the scores for The Dark Knight and Dunkirk, and also for sound effects: ‘The Batpod, the motorbike version of the Batmobile that Batman drives in The Dark Knight, it never downshifts,
so the engine continually rises in pitch – and that was based on experiments we’d done with Shepard Tones.’ This description reveals much about Nolan’s approach to film-making, with a focus on the small details of a production and an innate curiosity about the power of sound.
Nolan had been working on a revival of the Batman story with screenwriter David S. Goyer since 2003. The caped crusader was last seen on the big screen in 1997 in the much derided Batman and Robin, and Nolan’s and Goyer’s vision was to tell the hero’s backstory. No ‘biffs!’ and ‘pows!’ in this tale, which, with a noir sheen typical of the director, explains Bruce Wayne’s fear of bats, how his parents died and why he chose to fight to defend Gotham City.
The Dark Knight Trilogy is still highly regarded by film-goers and directors, having influenced other comic-book movie franchises to explore darker tones and emotional depth, and the director knew he needed a confident pair of hands to score such a large-scale project weighted with expectation. In the sleeve notes for The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan explains he recruited Zimmer to help provide a ‘fresh musical approach’ for the reinvention of Batman, stating, ‘For me, Hans Zimmer was the sound of contemporary movies.’ The composer is said to have asked some difficult questions when they met to discuss the project, such as whether the music needed to sound ‘heroic’ in the first place, demonstrating ‘an unerring ability to hone in on the one thought that cracks a project open’. For some time Zimmer had been wanting to work with his friend and fellow composer James Newton Howard, an eight-time Academy Award nominee perhaps best known for his long-standing collaboration with director M. Night Shyamalan, and suggested to Nolan that he bring him along for the ride.